Email Marketing – How Often Does She Want to Hear From You?

Email is an incredibly powerful tool to create relationships and increase sales to your female customers. But how often does she really want to hear from you? If you sell products every time you send out an email, why not send them out all the time?

At what point does increasing frequency actually diminish returns? In other words, at what point are you sending so many emails she stops responding?

Put yourself in your subscribers' shoes.Speak to them when they need, want or expect to hear from you—rather than when you have something to say. "You'll know what those points are only if you've walked in their shoes, mapping their decision and consideration paths," she says. Start walkin'.

Offer frequency options. Many subscriptions are dropped because recipients simply don't want so many messages; if they have the ability to reduce the number of emails they receive, they might prefer to remain on your list. By all means, give them that option!

Test any changes. Before making any permanent changes, compare results from the new frequency against the old. "A head-to-head test of different frequencies over a specified test period will tell you whether sending more often reaps greater rewards, or greater punishment," she says.

Great advice. Email is a fabulous way to create relationships with your customers, but treat that relationship with respect.

Testing changes is great advice, not enough email marketers do it. That said, testing a change after you make it isn’t ideal. If your list is big enough, try split it up into a control group and a test group. If you simply make a change in frequency and compare it to last month’s numbers, you may not be accounting for outside influences. For example, I bet recipients have a different willingness to deal with lots of emails around the holidays.